June 9th marked a little-known anniversary. On that day in 1999, Yugoslavia’s army withdrew from Kosovo, following 78 consecutive days of NATO bombing. In return for ceasing its criminal campaign, the US-led military alliance was permitted unimpeded, unchallenged freedom of movement and action throughout the province. The Yugoslav military’s exit instantly opened the floodgates for a genocide of the province’s Serb population to erupt, under the watchful eye of NATO and UN peacekeepers. To this day, the region lives with the cataclysm’s destructive consequences.
NATO’s March – June 1999 aerial assault on Yugoslavia was ostensibly waged to prevent an impending mass slaughter of Albanians in Kosovo. Yet, as a May 2000 British parliamentary committee concluded, all purported abuses of Albanian citizens occurred after the bombing began. Moreover, the alliance’s intervention was found to have actively encouraged Slobodan Milosevic to aggressively neutralise the CIA and MI6-backed, civilian-targeting narcoterrorist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), with which Belgrade was truly at war.
The KLA had for years by this point sought to create an ethnically pure Kosovo via insurrectionary violence, in service of constructing “Greater Albania” – an irredentist, Nazi-inspired entity comprising territory in modern-day Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Yugoslavia’s military departing the province at last provided the Al Qaeda-linked terror group with a grand window of opportunity to achieve that mephitic goal. There was a gap of several days before thousands of NATO and UN “peacekeepers” – known as KFOR – arrived in Kosovo, on June 12th 1999.
Hellbound and Down 